Blog: October 2013

In recent weeks Google introduced another big update to their search engine, and yer ok there's Bing and Yahoo but come on lets face it, we all only actually care about our website's position in Google and so now you're all desperate to find out what the Google hummingbird update means for our website. The good news is that it's nowhere near as bad as the penguin update.

If you're reading this post then you're probably already using the great free service provided by ISSUU called "smartlook" which enables people using your website to read your PDF's online like a book (have a look at this example from a Drupal website we built)....and if you're not a) how did you get here and b) you should be using it!

Smartlook is funny little tool which ISSUU themselves really don't seem to make much noise about and if you've had a look in forums will have discovered aren't super quick at responding to "issues" (excuse the pun) about either. So one wonders if one day it will cease to exist, but never the less right now its still here and is pretty good.

A problem I came up against was that I needed 2 links on my page. One for reading online with smartlook and one so that users download the pdf, and issue kept hi-jacking both links so even the download one opened in issuu. A bit of searching soon made me realise this was a common frustration.....

Today I hit a annoying little problem on WordPress that I've seen before, in all fairness I think from reading some of the documentation I may well simply have hit this problem because I'm a man and thought I knew better than reading the instructions, but lets gloss over that for a moment and pretend that this is genuine problem with WordPress and nothing to do with my aversion to instructions!